The ALL NEW Don't Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate (10 page)

Again, in our democracy, the private depends on the public. Do we care about whether our fellow citizens are free, or not?

Discrimination: Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation

By now, our history has made clear that racism is a freedom issue. It can impose poverty, lack of education, ill-health, and worse. As we saw with Trayvon Martin, it can get you killed in some states.

Our recent history has made it clear that homophobia is a freedom issue. It is as normal to be gay as it is to be left-handed. Freedom to marry for people who happen to be gay is as much a matter of love and commitment as it is for people who happen to be straight, and a denial of marriage or other rights on the basis of whether you are straight or gay is a freedom issue. That is becoming clearer all over America.

The first edition of this book played a role in the adequate framing of the deepest reality of gay rights. The prior arguments were about rights of inheritance, of hospital visitation—discrimination in monetary and social matters. These were practical issues. What this book made clear was that the issue was fundamentally moral—a matter of love and commitment. All people should be free to marry whoever they love and want to be committed to for life. Progressives began using that message more and more frequently beginning a decade ago, and we have seen the right to marry progress by leaps and bounds.

Framing the truth at the deepest moral level matters.

What have been called “women’s issues” are also freedom issues, and these have not been adequately framed as such. In general:

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Body control.
The right of human beings to control their own bodies is a freedom issue.

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Respect.
The right of human beings to be treated institutionally with respect as a human being is a freedom issue.

Women are human beings and have a right to control their own bodies. When that is denied, they are not free. Control over a woman’s body arises in a wide variety of cases:

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Sex education.
For women especially, sex education is required for control over one’s body, since women need education about menstruation, sexually transmitted diseases that can affect future childbirth, how sex can lead to pregnancy, and how reproduction can be controlled.

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Control of reproduction.
Reproduction occurs through women’s bodies and affects those bodies in a great many ways. Women need to be in control of whether or when they reproduce. Thus access to family planning advice, birth control methods, and abortion are issues of control of a woman over her body.

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Forced ultrasounds and attacks on family planning.
Forcing a woman to undergo humiliation in order to exert control over her own body is a freedom issue. For example, forcing a woman, as in Texas, to have a mostly male-administered ultrasound twenty-four hours before an abortion, or allowing anti-abortion advocates to hound her on her way to a clinic, is a freedom issue for women. Passing laws that make it impossible to keep family planning clinics open is also a violation of women’s freedom.

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Humiliating victims of sex crimes.
A free woman has control over her own body. Sex that violates that control includes rape, drugging a woman in order to have sex, exerting physical or psychological force to have sex, and so on. Police and courts who humiliate a woman who has been raped are violating her freedom.

These are all freedom issues. They are rooted in circumstances that apply to women, but they are special cases of the freedom of all human beings to control their own bodies.

There are also circumstances where women are not being treated like other human beings on an institutional level—in significant ways:

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Equal pay for equal work.
This is not just an equality issue. It is an issue of whether women are being treated like any other human being would, or should, be treated.

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Equality in the rating of ability for a position in an institution.
In a free society, gender should make no difference in whether or not a person gets a job, a promotion, admission to an academic program, nomination for political office, and so on.

These, too, are freedom issues. You are not free when you are not treated like other human beings with respect to how you function in an institution.

Equality and freedom are not separate issues. Discrimination is a denial of freedom. Freedom is more general. It has to do with a clear path (no one standing in your way or placing obstacles) or with possessions you have a right to. It is freedom that is at the heart of democracy. And it is freedom that concerns everyone who has needs, dreams, and goals.

The present Democratic framing is the War on Women. I don’t know if it is a good money-raising tactic. But it is not effective framing beyond strong feminist progressives. Strict father morality is partly about preserving male authority over women by claiming protectiveness and support of women—anything but a war against them. Conservative women, too, tend to see male authority as protectiveness, or support for motherhood as the basic female function.

The War on Women works for feminist progressive women, who correctly see their values as under attack. But it doesn’t work so well for conservative or biconceptual women. Freedom, on the other hand, allows women to decide for themselves, whatever their views on abortion, contraception, and sex education.

Unions and Pensions

Workers are profit creators.

Conservatives like to speak of wealthy company owners and investors as “job creators,” that they “give” people jobs, as if they just create jobs as gifts for people who are out of work. That is nonsense. The truth is that workers are profit creators, and that no one gets hired unless they contribute to the profit of owners and investors.

It is basic truth. Workers are profit creators. But who says it? How many times, if any, have you heard that truth? It is an important truth; it reframes the issue of jobs from the perspective of the contributions of those who work.

As we discussed earlier, a pension is a delayed payment for work already done.

This is the most fundamental truth about pensions, and it is almost never said. It is an unframed truth.

When you take a job and a pension comes with it, that pension is part of your pay, part of your conditions of employment. It is common for workers to forego higher current pay if there is a significant pension, since the pension is money to live on when you can no longer work. It is part of the employment contract.

The idea behind pensions is that a company can pay less in salary, take the remaining money and invest it, assuming it can invest it at a higher return than the worker could, then make a profit on the investment return when the pension is later paid.

An additional idea behind pensions is that they keep employees loyal to the employer, and so employers save money on having to train new workers, and in addition they can retain workers who know the business and so can be more efficient than new workers.

In short, a pension is anything but a gift to an employee. It is earned. And it is set up to profit the employer as well as the employee.

Unfortunately, money for pensions is often misappropriated or mishandled by the institutions. It may be badly invested or used for some other purpose, like paying dividends to stockholders or salaries to management. So when a company (say, General Motors) or a city or state says to its employees that it cannot “afford” to pay pensions, they are engaging in theft and the thieves should be prosecuted.

The money has been earned. If it has been used for some other purpose, it has been stolen. If it has been badly invested, then the investment loss is the company’s, and the pensioners should have a claim on the company’s assets.

Unfortunately, framing enters in here. Pensions and health care are called “benefits,” as if they are generous gifts to employees. They are not gifts. They are earned as deferred payments for work done. When a company tells its employees that they can no longer afford such “generous benefits” and will have to cut them, it is a framing lie. Either there has been theft or misinvestment or mismanagement. “Benefits” are earnings, period.

Pensions and benefits are freedom issues. In a free society, there is a justice system that punishes thefts, adjudicates contracts, and in the case of misappropriation of funds, permits lawsuits to make a claim on assets to make up for losses and the costs of the lawsuit—emotional and monetary. To the extent that there is no such justice system, people with pensions and benefits that have been taken from them are not free.

Large companies—and some small ones—have two kinds of employees: the assets and the resources.

The “assets” include major management and especially creative or skilled people whose special creativity and skills are necessary to the company’s success. They are part of the stock value of the company. They are hired by “headhunters” and command high salaries and golden parachutes—high pensions and compensation packages.

The “resources” are interchangeable workers that can be hired from an employment pool. They are hired and managed by the Human Resources Department. Just as resources like gas or oil or steel are purchased as cheaply as possible, so, too, are human resources purchased as cheaply as possible. Since pay scales often match skill level, they tend to be hired at the lowest possible skill level and at the lowest cost. When unemployment is high and the employment pool is large, companies can offer less in salary and “benefits” and still get appropriate human resources, while maximizing profits and payments to “assets.”

Unionization is a freedom issue.

Companies that are hiring human resources, in general, have much more power than individuals seeking such a job. When the company is large and there is a big human resource pool, workers seeking jobs have to take what is offered—or the job will go to the next person in the pool. This includes not just salary and benefits, but also working conditions—job safety, working hours, overtime, and so on. The employee is serving on the company’s terms, and often at the company’s whims.

In capitalist economic theory, employment is a transaction in which the employer buys the labor of the employees and the employees sell their labor to the employer. Hence the term
labor market
. It is assumed in economic transactions that both will seek the best deal. Unions create the best deal for the resource-employees.

Unions function to equalize the power of the company over the employee. Short of outsourcing, companies cannot function without any resource-workers at all. If the company is unionized, then all the workers as a group have bargaining power that a solitary worker does not have.

The alternative—taking whatever the company offers to the individual—might well be called corporate servitude or wage slavery. As the power of unions has declined, the wages of resource-workers have not gone up in thirty years. Over the same time, the wealth of wealthy investors and corporations has skyrocketed without more being produced.

The decline of unions has meant a decline for most citizens in their share of their nation’s wealth, and with it a decline in all the freedoms that wealth brings.

Unionization is a freedom issue, and needs to be understood as such. But the failure to say it out loud and repeat it as often as possible allows conservatives to form organizations like the Center for Worker Freedom, as if unions were taking away freedom, and to speak of “Right to Work” laws, as if unions were taking rights away instead of granting you freedom from corporate servitude and wage slavery.

Immigration

America is a country of immigrants. Many of them have been refugees, either refugees fleeing from brutal oppression or economic refugees fleeing from equally brutalizing poverty. They have come here for freedom.

My own grandparents were such refugees—and if you are not Native American, your ancestors most likely were too. Upon arriving in America, my grandparents became Americans in the best sense of the word: hard-working, raising their families, highly ethical, and loving and appreciating this country. I suspect that your ancestors were like that as well.

The issue of “immigration” is about a new generation of such refugees. President Obama, in a speech on June 22, 2012, at the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials conference in Florida clearly and beautifully stated his moral understanding of the issue. His words showed that the current wave of refugees, referred to as “undocumented immigrants,” are in many ways already citizens—they contribute enormously to American society and the American economy through hard work, they love the country they live in, they are patriots, they share their lives with other Americans every day, they take on individual and social responsibility. The president offered more than just freedom; he offered appreciation. They have earned not just recognition as Americans, but our gratitude as well for all that they have contributed through hard work, often at low pay.

They are fine Americans already and, through the lives they have been living as Americans, have earned the documentation that other Americans have gotten just by being born, without earning it. This is a moral narrative that tells a truth and needs to be repeated. But it rarely is.

There are two metaphors, one liberal and one conservative, that do not do the refugees justice. The liberal metaphor is the Path to Citizenship, as if citizenship should be the end of a long, hard journey, with little granted along the way, with long years in limbo, and legal residency only to those who act as ideal citizens and either go to college or serve in the military. The DREAM Act, which would allow such access to the American Dream, doesn’t have the right name. It makes these de facto citizens into those who can only dream, as if they are not acting every day just as citizens—the “best” of our citizens—act. At the very least they are earning, and deserve, a minimum along the way: health care, decent housing, decent working conditions, a living wage, and access to education for themselves and their children—and the right to a driver’s license. They deserve not just freedom, but gratitude.